2018 Friday Poster 6570

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Bilingualism effects in children with Specific Language Impairment: metalinguistic awareness, executive functions and false-belief reasoning
E. Peristeri, E. Baldimtsi, S. Durrleman, I. Tsimpli

Introduction. Bilingualism in typically-developing (TD) children has been linked to enhanced Theory of Mind (ToM) performance, specifically for false-belief attribution [1,2]. This ToM advantage has been related to improved executive functions (EFs) in bilinguals [2,3], such as inhibition or set-shifting skills [4]. The ToM advantage in bilinguals has also been attributed to enhanced metalinguistic awareness [5], e.g. bilinguals’ ability to reflect on meaning and form. Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), aside from their formal language delays, exhibit difficulties in all the aforementioned areas, namely metalinguistic awareness [6], EFs [7] (although see [8]), and ToM [9]. Delays in ToM may nevertheless be attenuated in tasks which minimize verbal demands [10]. The goals of the present study are to investigate possible effects of bilingualism (a) on verbal and non-verbal ToM and (b) on the links between ToM, EF and metalinguistic awareness in children with SLI.

Method. Participants included 16 bilingual children with SLI (henceforth, SLIbi) (Mean age: 10;4), and age-matched monolingual children with SLI (SLImono), monolingual and bilingual TD children (TDmono, TDbi). Children were given language proficiency measures (vocabulary, sentence repetition, syntactic comprehension), a word definition task as a metalinguistic awareness measure (WISC-III; [11]), a non-verbal EF battery (mixed global- local attention shifting & inhibition task, 2-back working memory task), and a ToM battery including tasks of varying complexity, in both verbal (first-order Unexpected Content & Transfer, second-order adapted from [12]) and non-verbal forms (adapted from [13]).

Results. SLImono and SLIbi children scored lower than TD children in all language measures (p<.001). SLImono children’s shifting cost in the local trials of the global-local task was larger than the rest of the groups (p<.001). In the 2-back task, SLImono children were less accurate than TDmono children (p=.05). In the verbal ToM tasks, SLImono children scored lower than SLIbi and TDmono groups in second-order ToM tasks (p<.05). In the nonverbal, first-order ToM task, SLIbi children were faster and more accurate than SLImono children on false- belief attribution (p<.02). Correlations between task performances revealed that first- and second-order verbal ToM correlated with first-order non-verbal ToM performance only for SLIbi children (p<.001). Also, metalinguistic awareness for the SLImono group correlated with Unexpected Content and Unexpected Transfer (p=.001), i.e. first order ToM, but not with second-order ToM, while for the SLIbi group (and TD children) metalinguistic performance only correlated with second-order ToM (p<.001). Finally, non-verbal ToM performance for SLImono children correlated with both EF tasks (p<.05), while non-verbal ToM performance correlated with the 2-back task for the rest of the groups (p<.04) (see Table 1).

Discussion. SLIbi and TDbi children had higher accuracy scores than SLImono children in the second-order verbal ToM and the non-verbal ToM task, as well as a lower shifting cost in the global-local task, thus, implying bilingual advantages at both the verbal and the non-verbal level of ToM and EF. Finally, findings show reliable interactions between false-belief performance and working memory for SLIbi, TDmono and TDbi children, in line with previous studies on the interaction between ToM and working memory in typical development [14].

References

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